Vertically Merged Cells Dangerous in W2K?

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At my workplace, a Presentation Center for an Investment Bank, we have to follow strict formatting rules because many people work on documents at various stages of their production.

One rule is NEVER to use Vertically Merged cells in a table, because “it can cause corruption of the document.”

Sometimes, the easiest way to insert a PPT graphic next to several rows in the table would be to use vertically merged cells. Instead, we are supposed to jump through several hoops by creating snaking columns with two tables, then playing around to make the tables line up properly. A real pain!

Can anyone point me to evidence that this feature can REALLY cause doc corruption?

Thanks

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Jeff,

That workaround does sound like a pain.
I’ve never seen vertically merged cells cause a document to corrupt, but I have seen them cause two classes of problems:

If you run a macro that loops through all the cells, rows or columns in a table, on a table that contains vertically merged cells, the macro will often give bad results or bomb.

Running a CompareRite on a document that contains vertically merged table cells, can cause bad results (I think DeltaView does handle these though).

Maybe one of the above reasons, or a similar one, was the original cause for this edict.

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Gidday,

I’ve seen problems in Excel with merged cells- but if you know there’s a possibility there, you can check if a cell is merged.

There’s a possible problem in Word if yo gou through rows in Column 1, but you miss on cells in column 2.

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Another possible reason for the edict: Not everyone who works on the document has Word 2K… but the work-around would cause as many problems with round-tripping as the merged verticals (if not more). I’ve been working with both DeltaView (2.5.175) and Word 2K(SR1(a)), and never seen problems with vertically merged cells.

One feature we don’t use, which may be driving your management’s policy… Word’s versioning and track/changes feature (We use a document management system). If so, that may open a whole new can of worms, and someone should probably tell “them” about metadata.

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Thanks for the response.

But to clarify, this is a Presentation Center, meaning that we’re sort of a high-powered “document factory” serving other departments. All operators have exactly the same setup, W2K, and our “clients” do not have edit privileges on the finished docs.

Also, we use document management software, PCDocs, and we don’t use the versioning features in W2K because they cause documents to BLOAT horribly and can lead to enormous files that take forever to save or can really get corrupt.

I think the macro aspect explains our “rule.”

—
Jeff

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I think you hit the proverbial nail on the head. We DO use a lot of macros that loop through tables for various reasons and I imagine that this is the reason for the edict.

If I were King of the Forest, I would change the rule to: “Don’t use our table macros on tables with vertically merged cells, OR ELSE you will run into problems.”

Thanks for your help.

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